Re: URL work in HTML 5

On 2012/10/16 5:00, Ted Hardie wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 11:37 AM, Larry Masinter<masinter@adobe.com>  wrote:
>
>> I think that's the bigger implication -- the vision that the web supplants all other (network) apps; for some systems,  "URLs to non-Web things" is an empty set.
>>
>> My understanding of Peter's survey of other specs that make reference to RFC 3987 was that there weren't any whose implementations relied on anything other than the browser to do URL/IRI resolution and processing.
>>
>
> First, can you provide a pointer to the survey?
>
> Second, while there may be systems for which the only handle for URIs
> is the the browser,

In my understanding, something like the Google Chrome OS, where there's 
not much of a distinction between browser and OS, would qualify here. 
But then such a system might not handle all schemes; maybe it wouldn't 
handle the snmp: example below.

> there are certainly systems for which that is not
> true.  To pick one produced close to when URIs became a full standard,
> look at RFC 4088 (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4088).  I doubt there
> are many browsers which dereference URIs like
> snmp://example.com/bridge1;800002b804616263 with their own handlers.

Yes. And there are many URI schemes where some browsers have handlers, 
but others don't. I may be wrong on one or two of these, but e.g. Opera 
has a built-in mailer, but Firefox or IE don't. Even with 
registerProtocolHandler, a scheme first has to be registered before it's 
taken oven by a browser (specifically, by a certain Web page through 
that browser). So there may be quite a lot of systems where 
theoretically (if the user registered every scheme with a web page), it 
would be possible to handle everything in the browser only, but 
practically, that wouldn't be the case.

> URIs used internally to systems outside the web may not be easily seen
> in a web-based corpus, but that does not mean that they are not there,
> nor that shifting the parsing rules won't effect them.

Yes indeed. A lot of what happens on the Web is very public. A lot of 
what happens otherwise isn't very public, but there is still a lot of 
that around.

Regards,   Martin.

Received on Tuesday, 16 October 2012 04:35:15 UTC